The cream always rises, the best man or woman will forever win, and the finest stuff will without fail find a wider audience.

Well, in a perfect world. And as anyone who’s had any sort of experience with the world knows, it’s far from a perfect place.

That’s doubly true when you break it down and find yourself viewing it through the prism of, say, the music industry, one where marketing is too often the key to mainstream appeal, with or without the quality or artistry to back it up. In other words, even the best stuff doesn’t always get its due.

“No it don’t,” says veteran Canadian hip-hop artist Classified with a laugh, while munching a tasty burger at Bridgeland eatery The Main Dish.

That, though, is something the man born Luke Boyd hopes to correct with his self-titled album which sees its release today. While certainly far from an underground sensation, thanks to 14 previous releases on both the indie and major label landscape, not to mention a handful of charting singles including the hit Oh . . . Canada, over the past few years he’s found that his audience and sales have plateaued somewhat and that the next level has proven elusive.

“That’s one of the reasons why we left Sony and went to Universal. We want to go for it with this one. We really want them to push it and market it like it’s a Nickelback record rather than another hip-hop record,” the personable and easygoing East Coast musician says during his one-day local stop during a cross-Canada jaunt.

“Like doing this, I’ve never done a promotional tour in Canada. . . . So different things like this is exciting to me because it’s like what is this going to transcend? I think the music stands up, if not better than my older stuff and now let’s see what we can do with the actual selling of the album.”

Time will, of course, tell, but as Classified says, his eponymous release has the songs to back up a big push.

Recorded sporadically over a six- or seven-month period beginning last April in his home studio, the 13-track offering finds the 35-year-old wonderfully walking the line between the imperfect world’s of hip-hop and pop, with his forceful raps snuggling into sugary melodies, such as on the album’s best track 3 Foot Tall, a singsongy anthem with a wonderfully sunny disposition, or the record’s first single Inner Ninja, which features folk artist David Myles and owes as much to Jack Johnson as it does anyone of the old-school persuasion.

Classified admits that the marriage comes naturally, and dates back to his preteen, pre-hip-hop days of childhood when he was weaned on his parents’ radio preferences, and supped from the songs of everyone from the Beatles to Huey Lewis and the News.

“So I was always attracted to melody rather than a four-bar loop for four minutes. That’s boring as s--t to me. I want to hear changes, I want to hear other instruments come in, I want to hear chord changes and things like that,” he says. “It never started like that. When I first started it was: ‘Make my beat, rap, there’s my song, it’s done.’ But doing it for 15 years, you grow and learn new processes of how to make music. I get very bored with stuff.”

Because of which, for this album, he wanted to approach it in an entirely different way, fully wedding his loves, looking to find the perfect bliss of “melody and substance,” and that, he says, he had to no longer think of himself as a rapper-producer but as someone who looks at the craft in a more classical way.

“I was trying to be a songwriter. I was trying to make full songs. Whether it was bringing in other artists to sing parts that I wrote or whatever, but I was just really trying to become more of a songwriter,” he says. “I guess with other albums, I would always look at songs (and think), ‘Do I like the rap in that? Nah, I don’t like the rap, I don’t like that song as much.’ Now, I look at the whole package, rather than break it down to rap, beats, chorus, whatever it is. I try to look at it as a song in whole. Like, ‘Maybe the rap wasn’t the greatest but this other stuff is so good in it that it makes the song better than the one where I just love the rap verse because the verse is so close to me.’

“This is the album where I just started to look at the songs in the whole picture.”

Part of his new outlook he credits to the production he’s recently done for other artists, including Myles, as well as even the cross-Canada arena tour opening for with Hedley, which he describes as “a whole new world for” him, that where the kids wanted to sing and get reeled in by the hooks rather than raps.

Still, though, that doesn’t mean he’s entirely turned his back on his hip-hop side, giving that a workout by flexing those rhyme skills throughout the record. It also features an impressive list of non “songwriter” guests, including fellow Canadian names Saukrates, Kardinal and Madchild, as well as one of Classified’s heroes Raekwon, whom he met last year and who professed to being a fan of what the Nova Scotia native does.

“It was cool. Just being a fan of ’90s hip-hop, it was a dream, for me,” Classified says admitting there was a sense of validation having one of the music’s pioneers contribute to his record. “It kind of is. Especially from someone that I’m a fan of, I’m a fan of Wu-Tang. The fact that he said he liked my style, I’m not gonna lie, it’s not like, ‘I don’t give a f--k.’ It’s like, ‘Man, Wu-Tang likes my s--t, that’s cool.’ ”

He’s also savvy enough to appreciates that, as far as marketing goes, it’s something of a coup to have that name associated with his new album, that it might pique the interest of the hip-hop heads. Then again, he also admits that he long ago stopped trying to please them, that the hip-hop world, like any other, is filled with fickle folk, who will love it on a blog for a day and then savage you the second they get a chance for a perceived slight against them or a direction that doesn’t adhere to their views. No, Classified says, he long ago stopped caring if wider success and staying true to his muse comes at the cost of get a few noses out of joint.

“I think I stopped giving a s--t years ago, honestly,” he says. “Hip-hop . . . is such a critical thing. Hip-hop guys will be the first to hate on you then love you to your face. It got to a point where it was like, ‘You know what? I don’t give a f--k about what the hip-hop guys think.’ Hip-hop guys don’t go to shows, they don’t support anyway — it’s me, it’s what I want to do and what interests me.

“The hip-hop community, the people I work with, I think I’ve earned their respect and that is always (important) to me. . . .

“But on a broader scale, I hate hip-hop nowadays anyway. I’m not saying it’s all bad, but 90 per cent of the s--t you hear I would never listen to it, I don’t listen to it, so I’m not looking for acceptance from them.”

Classified’s self-titled release is available today. He performs April 6 at the MacEwan Ballroom.

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